chap ter four

Big S, Small S

I
n the South West of London, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, are
bound by the contour of the River Thames to the north, high walls
everywhere else. A storied institution of natural sciences, Kew is home
to more than eight million specimens of plants and fungi.1 Its vast lawns
are populated by diverse, neatly spaced specimens of flowers, shrubs, and
trees, with stately greenhouses and courtyards presenting the very image of
an imperial conservatory, a grand sight even in the gray winter.
Pacing the length of the southern wall, I found the side entrance
and the big yellow security phone. Hanging it up, the gate swung open
to reveal the Jodrell Laboratory, where Dr. Brian Douglas waited for
me outside. With a soft-spoken and easygoing manner that contrasted
with the magisterial environment of Kew, he led us inside to an atrium
where big windows separated us from a gleaming two-story laboratory.
Through the glass, we chatted for a moment as scientists bustled busily
about in the bright white space. After a quick overview of the Mycology
department’s work, we headed downstairs, passing a series of large, vivid
color portraits of pollen and descending a steep staircase that led straight
to the door of the fungarium.
Tall concrete-walled corridors were lined by aisle upon movable aisle
of pea-green storage boxes, stacked a dozen high and stretching toward
the vanishing point. All told, they contained some 1.25 million different
species.2 More than fifty thousand of them were type specimens, those

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that mark the basis of an organism’s formal recognition by science. It is

the largest reference collection of fungi in the world. “Think of this as a
Rosetta stone for fungi,” said Douglas. Sequencing the entire fungarium
collection, he said, would be a benefit to fungal taxonomy comparable to
what deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics meant to archaeology.
Tours are common at Kew, so a number of the most crowd-­pleasing
specimens were kept out on display. Atop a glass case in the main
throughway was a ram’s skull, its horns sheathed in the chalky myce-
lium of a bone-eating ascomycete. Next to it was a tub of Marmite—a
by-product of beer brewing, the favorite English spread is derived from a
fungus, every brewer and baker’s favorite yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae.3
Inside the case were many other fungal curiosities, including desiccated
little orange globs, Cyttaria darwinii, or Darwin’s fungus, brought back
with the famous naturalist himself from Tierra del Fuego on the voyage
of the HMS Beagle. His fading signature was scrawled on a slip of paper
right beside them.
Much of Kew’s massive collections comes from decades—centuries,
really—of international scientific collaborations and collection efforts.
But it also reflects a history of colonialism, a fact that is not lost on Kew
and its leadership. “For hundreds of years, rich countries in the north
have exploited natural resources and human knowledge in the south,”
wrote Alexandre Antonelli, Kew’s director of Science. “Colonial botanists
would embark on dangerous expeditions in the name of science but were
ultimately tasked with finding economically profitable plants. Much of
Kew’s work in the nineteenth century focused on the movement of such
plants around the British Empire, which means we too have a legacy that
is deeply rooted in colonialism.”4
Douglas was happy to indulge my curiosity as we peered into boxes
and behind glass cases, but he was not there as a tour guide. Two months
shy of finishing his contract as the community fungus survey leader for
Kew’s Lost and Found Fungi project, or LAFF, he described the five-
year effort as having a threefold mission: to update the understanding
and conservation status of fungal species in the United Kingdom, to
make a lasting contribution to U.K. mycology, and to improve fungal
education and awareness in general.

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The first part involved running down a list of one hundred fungal spe-
cies, about which there were few enough records to justify a reassessment
of rarity. For a species to get on the LAFF list meant it had been found in
fewer than five sites across the U.K. over the previous fifty years, or that it
was newly discovered, or recently disambiguated from a group of similar
fungi, among other criteria. Those deemed to be genuinely under threat
would be added to the National Red List of Threatened Fungi.
National Red Lists work like regionally focused versions of the Inter-
national Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Global Red List, both
representing authoritative records of the species most at risk of extinction,
and effective tools for mobilizing changes in conservation policy.
To get a sense of the disparity in conservation information for fungi,
we can compare them to plants. As of this writing, in Great Britain,
the official Red List includes 37 species of fungi, all of them boletes,
compared with some 1,756 species of vascular plants. The pattern is
also reflected on the global scale; as of March 2020, the global Red list
contained 343 entries for all fungi compared with 43,557 entries for
all plants.5 Lack of information about the diversity and distribution of
fungi, though, is a problem by no means limited to the U.K.
Fungi are generally underreported, in large part because they’re sim-
ply not as easy to document as plants or animals. Fungi in the wild can
be fickle, appearing and disappearing at varying intervals depending on
environmental conditions, time of year, and other factors yet to be fully
understood. The fungi that produce mushrooms are a small minority
of the world’s species, and they don’t (one hopes) often make them-
selves known to observers by flying overhead or scurrying up a tree.
Assessment of fungal species’ conservation priority is therefore often
qualified by the difficulties in comprehensively documenting them.
Those listed as safe might in fact be threatened, but overrepresented in
the collections; those listed as extinct might actually be plentiful, just
underreported. Douglas also noted the inadequate documentation of
habitat loss over the last fifty years, another key factor in understanding
the threat posed to fungi, along with all other forms of life. The goal of
the LAFF was to work toward “ground-truthing” the rarity of fungal
species, as Douglas put it, and to get a more accurate sense of any threats

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to their populations. It was also to show how doing so was possible with
dwindling resources.
Even an institution as august as RBG Kew faces budgetary limits that
prohibit deploying the army of skilled collectors required to fill the gaps
in the fungal record. In 2015, funding cuts left Kew with a budget deficit
of some £5.5 million per year.6 That meant projects like LAFF, no matter
how essential or successful, had to be sustained through onetime grants.
But despite a strain of cultural disdain toward fungi, a robust coalition
of amateurs and enthusiasts made the LAFF possible, supported in their
own “treasure hunts” for target fungi that then fed back into Kew’s own
reporting of regional diversity, and eventually to the Red List. “We’re
tapping back into the citizen science community, which we’ve always
traditionally worked with to an extent,” Douglas said as we settled in at
a computer terminal to review the results.
The LAFF released a rolling list of species that amateurs could seek
out and contribute. “Puffballs, brackets, smut and rust fungi, tiny cup
fungi, leaf-spot parasites, lichenised fungi, and more,” read the project
website.7 Some species were chosen because they hadn’t been recorded
in the U.K. for more than fifty years; others were known from only a
few sites, so their relative rarity or abundance was unclear. Others were
new to science, while still others had already been listed as worthy of
conservation concern. A diversity of habitats was represented as well,
“from dune systems to mountain plateaus, bogs, calcareous marshes,
ancient woodland, orchards, or urban areas and gardens.”
Nearing the end of its five-year life, the project had added some
1,400 new records of rarely recorded species; around half as many as had
been collected in the previous fifty years.8 As the project wrapped up,
they had found seventy-seven out of their one hundred target specimens,
spanning more than seven hundred different sites across the U.K. “Some
species have gone from two or three records in the world to us knowing
that they’re widespread,” Douglas said with a note of pride. “Some species
have gone from us knowing they’ve recently arrived to the U.K., and now
have spread; others we haven’t found, so they’re possibly still very rare,
but you can’t confirm that by not finding something.” Five years is hardly
enough to mount a comprehensive survey of an entire country’s fungi,

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though, and especially with financial resources for taxonomy dwindling,

Kew was limited in its ability to do much of any field survey work.
Traditionally, taxonomy involved a group of experts using their
highly specialized knowledge of their local environments and the fungi
that live there to identify new and interesting species, often based
on subtle physical traits. DNA sequencing has added a whole new
dimension to taxonomy, but still relies on physical reference specimens
to make the genetic bar codes meaningful. Douglas reported that such
“morphotaxonomy” was receiving steadily less funding, with almost none
going toward conservation save for a few small grants from a handful of
national organizations. As a result, when some interesting new mush-
room comes in the door, there are fewer people to work out where it fits
in the fungal menagerie. So, Douglas and his fellow mycologists turned
to the amateurs to help fill the gap.
“I’ve been all over the U.K., on a variety of different buses, overnight
trains up to Scotland for forays, workshops, and study weeks,” Douglas
said, noting that he doesn’t drive. We resumed our stroll through the
wide-open grounds of Kew, chatting as swans stalked us to the door of
the cafeteria. “We realized that if we want to get results, we have to help
other people, and establish goodwill for common shared aims, and that
is what we do. We try to help the field mycologist community, which
involves meeting in person, lots of emails back and forth, giving them
lots of ideas, and encouragement, more than anything else.”
Many of those field mycologists were part of independent regional
clubs associated with the British Mycological Society (BMS). Founded
in 1896, the BMS is the second-oldest national mycological society in
the world. (France established the first, in 1884.)9 The various groups
affiliated with the BMS organize forays throughout England, Scotland,
and Wales, representing a latent base of enthusiasm and knowledge that
Kew could tap in its efforts to burnish the understanding of fungi in the
United Kingdom.
Toward the end of the LAFF project, some of these groups were
equipped by Kew directly to prepare their own DNA sequences, by way
of laptop-sized Bento Labs; portable DNA extraction and amplifica-
tion kits, each featuring an onboard centrifuge, thermocycler, and gel

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electrophoresis (a readout for visually assessing the quality of the results).

Forayers could fetch fungi from LAFF’s lists, or any other interesting
finds, prepare the specimens for sequencing with the kit, then send them
off for analysis. The hope was to better identify conservation-worthy
fungi, but also to “upskill” the U.K. mycological community, opening
the door for amateur field mycologists to submit DNA bar-coded
specimens straight into Kew, or other international research institutions.
This approach bypassed the bottlenecks created by a shrinking group of
taxonomists faced with a backlog of new, as yet unidentified, specimens.
The amateur field mycologist, taking all the steps themselves, could get
information back about a sequenced specimen in three days for four
pounds, plus postage, and the institutions got useful data on new and
interesting species.
“The main difference with the field community is that they have the
time to learn about general diversity whereas we need to specialize on
certain groups,” said Ester Gaya, senior research leader of the Compar-
ative Plant and Fungal Biology at Kew. She joined us for a brief pit stop
at the break room. “You need a lot of time to dwell on a group, you can’t
afford to do it all.”
Historically, pretty much anyone could send a letter or, more recently,
an email to a department at Kew to get answers about plants or fungi:
What is this thing called? Have I found a new species? “All the way
through the history of Kew, the mycologists have worked with amateur
experts and enthusiasts,” said Douglas. “That’s happened from the 1900s
all the way up to very recently. Where do you think most of the fungar-
ium came from? Much of it is the collections of the amateur experts,
and these collections have all been brought together in one place as a
national reference collection. But now there’s no funding for taxonomy,
and there’s no taxonomy training even close to the same extent as you
used to have.”
The dawn of genetic sequencing has represented a sunset of sorts for
traditional taxonomy, the study of the features of organisms and how
they relate based on their physical, observable traits. But those traits and
the skills to identify them still play a crucial role. You can compare all
the DNA sequences you like, but without specific sequences pegged to

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physical specimens, you can’t really be sure of what you have. At Kew, there
were two morphotaxonomists for non-lichenized fungi remaining—Paul
Cannon and Martyn Ainsworth—already well into their careers, working
part-time and with no clear successors lined up to take over once they
retired. Traditionally, taxonomists would commit decades of their lives to
their specialized knowledge, passing it on in a mentor-teacher arrange-
ment. “You had an assistant mycologist and a head mycologist,” Douglas
explained. “Sort of like the Dark Lords of the Sith, but not evil.”
The gradual decline of that tradition has left the question of who will
carry the knowledge forward, and how. In the meantime Kew’s myco-
logical ranks have actually grown, and diversified their focus, embracing
genetic sequencing, building out one of the only master’s courses in the
country involving fungal taxonomy, studying the impacts of pollution
on ectomycorrhizae, even publishing a massive, first-of-its-kind “State
of the World’s Fungi” report in 2018. The three most recently appointed
mycologists in senior positions at Kew were also women, including
Gaya. “If anything, I feel mycology at Kew has revived extraordinarily
in the last years,” said Gaya, whose ongoing projects include leading the
institution’s involvement in the Darwin Tree of Life Project, which aims
to sequence all fungi in the British Isles, also involving partnerships with
the amateur field mycologists. “We mycologists are just evolving, the
same way our subject of study does.”
The role of an institution like Kew can be described as one of accru-
ing, retaining, and dispensing biological knowledge, backed by physical
collections, a cornerstone of taxonomy. Douglas described his own per-
spective on Kew’s role as one of supporting the U.K.’s capacity for fungal
taxonomy and knowledge. Given its reputation and resources, it acts as
a vault as well as a gatekeeper. Kew’s work with the communities of
amateur mycophiles may serve as an example of how large institutions
can adapt as funding for science dwindles, as the roles for specialized
taxonomists become more scarce, and as scientific expertise grows more
generalized and widespread.
DNA sequencing has gradually taken its place as the state of the art
in natural sciences, and advances in technology have made it easier for
nonprofessionals to do the basic work of documenting what fungi exist

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and where. “It is a lot easier to teach a field mycologist to do DNA work
than it is to teach field mycology to someone who’s got molecular lab
skills,” said Douglas. “One is essentially making a complicated cake, and
then doing some pattern matching, and the other is teaching them about
the biodiversity of seventeen thousand species in one country.”
As Kew distributed its five Bento Lab boxes to various amateur groups
around the U.K., it was with safe and easy-to-learn preparation methods
adapted for fungi by Dr. David Harries, a dedicated amateur mycologist
and cofounder of the Pembrokeshire Fungus Recording Network, which
operates a small genetic sequencing lab out of the corner of his garage.10
According to Douglas, the sequences he receives from amateurs are often
on par in quality to those prepared at Kew, a testament to the care the
enthusiast groups put into their work, and suggesting a real future for the
nonacademic mycological community in generating data of high quality,
and in significant quantities.
“It will be a full cycle back to the old days, where the people describing
the fungi are the amateur enthusiasts, only this time they’ll be DNA-­
enabled,” Douglas said. “There’s a lack of expertise at the top in terms of
professional mycologists, so the knowledge pyramid has flattened, but
it’s got a hell of a lot wider.”

———
After a day at the fungarium, Douglas took me to a pub around the
corner from the lab, aptly named the Botanist. Soon we were joined by
Nathan Smith, a young PhD student who had just that day begun a
stint at Kew, bringing with him a keen interest in the history of British
mycology. Between sips of beer and mouthfuls of chips, I learned about
the foundations of British mycology.
The Victorian era was a boon for the natural sciences in Britain.
The middle of the nineteeth century was the era of the naturalist clubs,
such as the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, which incubated a culture
of mycology that lives on today, organizing an early “foray among the
funguses” that became an annual event on the first week of October.11
Members would traipse about the woods gathering mushrooms into
baskets, displaying their finds on a table, and deducing their identities

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while sipping tea, an agenda that any member of a mycological society

in North America could recognize.12
“It becomes very fashionable,” said Smith, himself a member of the
regional mycology club in Cambridge. Mycology started gaining traction
in nineteenth-century England, he said, thanks largely to the work of
amateurs with broad interest in natural sciences. “You have a big rise in nat-
ural history societies, you have a big rise of field clubs, which are different
because they’re about going out into the field. They’re also less elitist, so you
have this big rise of field clubs that are less elitist; you have your weekends
starting to be codified into law, so more people have free time; and you
have the fact that by then no one’s actually studied fungi.” Of course, “less
elitist” in Victorian England may be something of a skewed standard; the
amateur mycology movement was led largely by country clergymen and
doctors.13 But even so, compared with the cloistered halls of the academic
institutions of the time, an open invitation to wander the woods and look
for mushrooms must have seemed like the realm of the hoi polloi.
To the Victorian naturalist, fungi represented a new field in which to
make discoveries, something that was quite in vogue at the time. With
fungi, though, it was possible to make discoveries in the backyard. “The
rich folks did all the plants and animals of the U.K.,” said Smith. “If you
want to be a botanist discovering things [back then] you need to go out
to the colonies. If you want to be a mycologist discovering things, you
need to move five meters that way.” Not unlike the early twenty-first
century, availability of new technologies like the microscope boosted
mycological studies in a context of rich naturalist tradition, to which
Kew was central. Naturalist clubs of various sorts formed and enjoyed
experimenting with the new tools of inquiry.14 Mycology, marginal then
as now, was near the center of the Victorian era of British naturalism
that would also take root in North America.15
England was the birthplace of the Linnean Society, the world’s
oldest active biological society.16 It is also home to the Royal Society,
the world’s oldest national scientific society, at one time presided over
by none other than Sir Isaac Newton.17 The Royal Society’s history was
intimately tied with the formation and ongoing funding of Kew itself.
Joseph Banks, prior to presiding over the Royal Society, was part of the

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exploratory voyage of James Cook (also a project of the Royal Society),

becoming the first “unofficial” director of Kew in its early form.18 Joseph
Berkeley, widely considered the founder of British mycology, described
around six hundred new species, and built up a collection of some ten
thousand specimens, which he ultimately donated to Kew, helping to
usher its arrival as a formal field of study.19 The role of mycologist was at
the time known as the Herbarium Principal Assistant of Cryptograms.
The first time Britain actually named mycology an official field of study
was in 1918, at the end of the First World War, when the Board of Agri-
culture created an advisory service that listed regional plant pathologists
as “advisory mycologists.”
Mordecai Cubitt Cooke was a colleague of Berkeley’s, joining Kew
in 1880 as a “cryptogramic botanist” (today, again, we would say mycol-
ogist).20 An eccentric science writer with a coarse beard and a penchant
for bowler hats and pipe tobacco, he had some problematic ideas about
the connections between race and use of certain drugs, and was in many
ways an outsider among his well-to-do colleagues. Mostly self-taught,
yet firmly in the center of the world of fungi in Britain, he actively orga-
nized amateur clubs around England, including the first foray among the
funguses, which gave rise to the British Mycological Society.21 Cooke’s
successor at Kew, George Massee, was also involved in the founding of
the BMS, as its first president, and was the last mycologist at Kew with-
out any formal training in the subject, being a new area of inquiry, formal
training was not to be expected. Famously arrogant, renowned scientist
and historian of the era John Ramsbottom said of Massee, “If he had any
capacity whatever for taking pains he would have been a genius.”22
One especially notable figure who dealt with Massee was none other
than Beatrix Potter. The author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit is less well known
for her significant contributions as a mycologist and nature illustrator. Prior
to her authorial fame, Potter spent a great deal of time in Kew’s herbar-
ium, producing hundreds of gorgeous illustrations of fungi, among other
organisms, even presenting a paper, “On the Germination of the Spores
of Angaricineae,” to the Linnaean Society in 1897; at the time, women
were all but forbidden from pursuing a proper scientific education, and
were prohibited from scientific societies, so her uncle delivered the paper in

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her stead.23 In that context, Potter’s efforts at contributing to the sciences

at Kew were, perhaps predictably, met with resistance. She appealed to
Massee to review her drawings and writings on fungi, and although he
“took objection to my slides,” as Potter later wrote, Massee did submit her
paper. It was unfortunately lost and never published, and the society issued
a posthumous apology to Potter for the sexism she experienced.24
In mycology as in every other field, female contributions in and
outside academia are many, if often overlooked.25 But that situation
has shifted in the years since; for example there are now more full-time
female mycologists at Kew than males, and more mycologists on staff
in general than ever before. Even in the Victorian era, male dominance
of mycology was not total. After Massee’s departure from Kew in 1915,
his successor as head of Mycology was Elsie Wakefield, who went on to
publish nearly one hundred articles on fungi, including the foundational
description of Psilocybe cyanescens in 1946.26
With mycology now firmly established as an academic field of study,
even as taxonomic and ecological research gives way to an emphasis
on genetic sequencing, amateur mycology has experienced something
of a revival outside institutions, including and maybe especially online.
Mushroom Spotters UK, a particularly active online community of
mycophiles, is growing fast, maintaining a Facebook page of more than
thirty-five thousand members as of this writing, adding thousands every
month. It’s one example of what seems to be a general swell of interest
in fungi throughout the United Kingdom and beyond.
“The presence of Facebook has been, I think, a very big catalyst in
this,” said Rich Wright, a young and affable independent mycologist
from Bristol who joined our table as the second round of beers arrived.
An active organizer of various community mycology groups, Wright had
been brought in to work with Kew as something of liaison with the
amateur recording communities. He reported noticing a distinct spike
in interest around the subject throughout the U.K. “It has exponentially
exploded in the last four years.”
Explosions aren’t known for being orderly, though. Everyone at the
table cited what they saw as growing pains in the putative online mush-
room communities, fraught with exhibitionism and the signs of a culture

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still establishing its norms and customs. While information of real value
was exchanged on these forums, they were also becoming venues for
what Wright bemoaned as pseudoscience and bickering. “There isn’t any
way that you can cut into that without ending up in some ridiculous
Facebook argument,” he said.
Smith chimed in, “I’ve done it once or twice and I won’t touch it again,”
adding that he thought the problems were mostly the signs of an adolescent
phase for the community. Across the pond in the United States, social
media also manages to be toxic around mycology, as with any other subject.
They voiced concern about certain aspects of American mycological culture
they’d observed making their way back from the USA. For example, the
growing popularity of potentially damaging foraging practices, overheated
assertions about mushrooms’ uses or abilities, and the surge in home culti-
vation that might introduce non-native strains into British ecosystems. But
they also noted a growing citizen science community in the United States
that was spreading knowledge and skills and making real contributions that
were redefining the field. In their work, they hoped, they might be helping
to foster something quite similar in the U.K.

So You Want to Be a Mycologist

After crossing a rain-slicked street in downtown Brooklyn, I ducked
under the awning of 33 Flatbush Avenue. The century-old former bank
had gone decades since its last renovation, so the broken buzzer was
hardly a surprise. As I dialed the number scrawled on a taped-up sheet of
paper, someone on their way out let me sidle through the door, into the
dim lobby and up the stairs. (The elevator was out of order, too.)
Nearing the fourth floor, I narrowly avoided colliding with Craig
Trester as he rushed in the opposite direction. In addition to leading the
night’s mycology class at Biotech Without Borders, it was his task to fetch
each new arrival from the front door. After a hurried greeting, we passed
through a long, unlit hallway flanked by dark, messy workspaces and the
half-visible fragments of artworks-in-progress. Under the ownership of
an eccentric old-timer named Al Attara, the seven-story Metropolitan
Exchange—MeX, for short—had since the late 1970s played host to

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